Two lovers flee a dystopian surveillance state and head for the hills in Benjy Kirkman's promo for legendary rock outfit Garbage.The video for There's No Future In Optimism is a cinematic, retrofuturistic vision - shot in Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands - boasting a grungy monochromatic cinematography and grade to match the defiant thrust of the song's lyrics. Using 16mm zooms and handheld camerawork director Kirkman and DoP Will Gething thrust the viewer into the world of the artistic young couple's shoes as they flee the concrete city, tracked by CCTV cameras. Retro-futurism and a return to nature is at the forefront of this creative, with a visual aesthetic that gels with the dark glamour of the band's classic videos of the Nineties. “I love the title," says Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson, of the song - which comes from the band's forthcoming 8th album. "The band sent it to me and I was like, 'This is great. I’m keeping that.' But the lyrics are an action against that title. Because if we allow our fatalism or our negativity to really take over, we will crumble. It’s about a city, in my case, Los Angeles, but it could be anywhere where bad stuff is happening."After the George Floyd murder, which is one of few things in my life that I wish I’d never seen: I was changed entirely by seeing the footage of that cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. In Los Angeles there were huge protests and a lot of upheaval after that. Above our house in Hollywood, there were helicopters all day long, for days on end. It was really precarious, chaotic and terrifying.”

Thomas Harrington-Rawle and Cathal McKeon direct a moving promo for East-London based singer and multi-instrumentalist Canty.Spanning a range of stylistic vignettes, the video intercuts shots of Canty riding an escalator with footage of daily life, switching between each with flickering image overlays.Building upon a distorted sense of place and time, the video mixes performance footage with surveillance style shots, following the artist around the city landscapes."I've been friends with James (Canty) for a while now and we've been working on a few videos together... he's one of the few artists I've met that's genuinely interested in finding the truth of experience in their art, it's always a pleasure to collaborate together," says Harrington-Rawle."We actually also used loads of scans of James's visual art on top of the actual video to create flickering overlays, I think those are my favourite moments in the video, that and the red bit!”

Jay Green creates a hard-hitting video about the reality of surveillance in London in the new video for Kam-Bu featuring Knucks in Call Me Back.Kam-Bu and Knucks are tired of being relentlessly watched and followed in the gripping visuals for their new collaboration, which sees the two rappers trade verses back and forth, weaving in and out of flows seamlessly with effortless chemistry and impact.Green does a superb job in establishing the atmosphere of paranoia in which they operate, emphasised by the black and white colours and docu-style camera work.And the kinetic editing, and use of split-screen, spurs a sense of disillusionment focusing on lingering shadows and sudden movement. This is very good indeed.